Objective quality selection for hybrid LoD models

Abstract

The problem of rendering large virtual 3D environments at interactive framerates has traditionally been solved by using polygonal Level-of-Detail (LoD) techniques, for which either a series of discrete models or one progressive model were determined during preprocessing. At runtime, several metrics such as distance, projection size and scene importance are used to scale the objects to such a resolution that a target framerate is maintained in order to provide a satisfactory user experience. In recent years however, image-based techniques have received a lot of interest from the research community because of their ability to represent complex models in a compact way, thereby also decreasing the time needed for rendering. One of the questions however that should be given some more consideration is when to switch from polygonal rendering to image-based rendering. In this paper we explore this topic further and provide a solution using an objective image quality metric which tries which we use to optimize render quality. We test the presented solution on both desktop and mobile systems.